Ashlyn's AP Government and Politics Blog

Unit 5
May 12th 2015

Public Policy Schools

Summary:

In the fall of 2013, Georgetown University announced that there was going to be a creation of a new school of public policy. This was all able to be done thanks to an alumnus donation of $100 million. In October of 2013, the University of New Hampshire announced that the school would use a $20 million gift/donation to launch a public policy school of its own. The first of the public policy schools were founded in response to the creation of New Deal government agencies in the early 1930s. "They trained many people who went into government and did good things," said John DiIulio, who runs the Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania and was the first director of President George W. Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He said that their training was a virtue of those schools, "they wired the house of American bureaucracy." The institutions missions began to change in the 1970s, when the Ford Foundation issued multimillion-dollar grants to eight universities, including Yale, Duke, and the University of Michigan. When John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University, announced the university's new policy school, he explained that "the availability of massive data to provide new analytic tools have resulted in an invaluable opportunity for our university." It has shown that many schools have began to "mishmash" the academic departments from which their faculty members are apart of. Those such as political science, economics, and sociology. The article then states that "those people may have no more or less interest than colleagues from their home departments in shaping actual policy." The article ends with the statement of "If policymakers ignore policy school research or can't understand it, what can policy professors and graduates possibly accomplish?" Wrapping up the whole article asking what is really the point/motives of these schools nowadays and how do they plan to solve this current issue.

Analysis:

It has been said that there is a critical need to reexamine public policy and it's impact on people's lives. The challenges we now face in our world are more complex compared to before. Challenges and issues which include things like climate change, demography, and budget problems. It requires Universities to seek for more ways that they can harness resources around it and expand the schools capacity so that they are able to respond to these complex challenges that we are facing. Fulfilling missions about continuing to do good. It is no longer just about studying, learning, and teaching, but it is about the impact and effect we can have on the world. Problems are not a package deal that all look the same. People, such as faculty members, are needed to have opposing opinions and viewpoints to be able to make good policy. The colleges will be bringing experts from many different areas of study to come together to find solutions to specific issues that have risen. Anyone working in the businesses like sociologists, lawyers, politicians, people from different walks of life assist policy making by contributing their different viewpoints. The key to policy formation is the use of evidence, the data that is available is exceeded expectations and data analysis is becoming an important skill to obtain. It is expected that schools like Georgetown University will have a trans-formative impact on the study and implementation of public policy. So here it is stated that, yes, there is a lot of benefits in public policy schools but there may be some drawbacks. I think that the implementation of the public policy schools in Universities is a good idea and will have a positive impact in the world. This article fits into our current unit of study by dealing with policies and public policy is a key subject in unit five.